Breaking the Thirty Year Deadlock:
Essay 2 - The Return of the Virtuous Politician

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, was
the last of the Five Good Emperors. He saw the life of a politician as
one of service and duty. He is best remembered for his Meditations,
a series of writings he wrote while on campaign for his own development.
According to Wikipedia, "His stoic ideas often revolve around the denial
of emotion, a skill which, he says, will free a man from the pains and
pleasures of the material world. He claims that the only way a man can
be harmed by others is to allow his reaction to overpower him. He shows
no particular religious faith in his writings, but seems to believe that
some sort of logical, benevolent force organizes the universe in such
a way that even 'bad' occurrences happen for the good of the whole."

August 2006

The First Part of the Problem

The first part of the problem to
be solved is How to break the deadlock of change resistance. A
social structure called The Dueling Loops pinpoints the root
cause of the deadlock. It is the inherent structural advantage
of the race to the bottom over the race to the top. The model
also shows that presently
problem solvers are pushing on the low leverage point of "more of
the truth."
This fails, because the system pushes back just as hard, causing
perpetual deadlock. Better would be breaking the stalemate
by finding the right high leverage points and
pushing there. This would cause the race to the top to go dominant,
which would quickly lead to the return of the virtuous politician.

How We Can Change the System So
Virtuous Politicians Are the Norm,
Rather Than the Exception

A virtuous politician is one whose political
goal is to
optimize the benefits available to society as a whole and to
treat everyone equitably, rather than to do whatever it takes
to get elected and stay elected. A virtuous politician is thus
much more likely to give problems like sustainability the priority
they deserve, which would overcome the
system's strong change resistance to solving the problem. If
your goal is to elect virtuous politicians, then Thwink.org
can help you achieve that mission.

The
analysis at Thwink.org has uncovered a fundamental social
structure called The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace. This
consists of the race to the bottom pitted against the race
to the top. Whichever loop gains the most supporters wins.

In the race to the bottom, corrupt politicians compete
for supporters on the basis of deception and favoritism.
But in the race to the top, virtuous politicians compete
for supporters on the basis of who can provide the greatest
good to the greatest number in a manner fair to all, without
resorting to deception or favoritism.

Using
a simulation model, the analysis shows that the race to the
bottom has an inherent structural advantage over the race to the top. This causes the race to
the bottom to attract the most politicians, and thus be dominant
most of the time. Because the race to the bottom requires generous
amounts of falsehood and favoritism to work, that is what characterizes
politics today.

Might there be a better way?

Thwink.org thinks there is. Because we have taken the time
to construct the social structure involved so clearly, the
high leverage points we need to push on to solve the problem
nearly leap off the page. What is most surprising about these
points is they have never been pushed in a unified, prolonged,
correct manner.

One high leverage point in particular exhibits behavior that
makes it the highest leverage point of them all. This is general
ability to detect political deception. But no one
is pushing there. Instead, the simulation model scenarios show
how environmentalists are currently pushing on an intuitively
attractive low leverage point called more
of the truth. This will not work, because the environmental
movement simply does not have the force (numbers, influence,
and wealth) necessary to make that a viable solution. The result
is perpetual deadlock, because the force is so easily countered
indefinitely.

In a complex social system, solution intervention
consists of two key decisions: where to apply a force,
and what force to apply. The first is by far the most
important, because location determines leverage, and
the greater the leverage the less force needed to solve
the problem.

If
problem solvers would unite and push on this high leverage
point, the model shows that the race to the top would
go dominant, causing the race to the bottom to collapse and
the deadlock to be broken, as voters change their allegiance
from corrupt to virtuous politicians. Finally, like The Return
of the King in Lord
of the Rings, civilization
would at last see a triumphant, long overdue transformation
that all virtuous citizens have dreamed of, but no
one knew how to cause:
The Return of the Virtuous Politician.

The dominance of the race to the bottom,
in which corrupt politicians control the system, is the chief
structural cause of the tremendous change resistance to solving
the sustainability problem. Change resistance is
the tendency for a system to resist change, even when a large
amount of force is applied. Like any other system behavior,
change resistance has a distinct cause. If the cause is known,
then candidate solution hypotheses can be intelligently created,
tested, and refined until one emerges that is good enough
to solve the problem.

But if the cause
of change resistance is not known, then problem solvers are
forced to guess at what solutions will work. Because thousands
of solutions are possible this cannot work, unless you
have a very long time to try each of them or get very lucky.

Plato's Allegory of the
Cave

Luck is unreliable. Guessing takes too long. But luck and
guessing is precisely what classic
activists have been using
to solve the sustainability problem. Like Plato's prisoners
in the cave, they cannot see the true reality of the situation.
Classic Activism is
the problem solving process used by most who are working on
the sustainability problem, including those in grassroots organizations,
academia, business, and government.

Classic activists around the world remain unaware
of the importance of the social side of the problem. Instead,
they view it is a simple technical problem. Their thinking
goes about like this: All you have to do is find the proper
technical practices for living sustainably, tell the people
the truth about the proper practices, and that should solve
the problem. If it doesn't, then all you have to do is exhort
and inspire people to adopt the proper practices or else. And
if that doesn't work, then all you have to do is... well, Classic
Activism has no other options, so they are stuck.

They are as stuck in their mindset as Plato's prisoners were
in the cave. In this allegory, found in book seven of The
Republic,
Plato presents a story and then interprets it. He asks the
reader to imagine there is a colony of prisoners who have been
chained for all their lives deep inside a dark cave. They are
so immobilized by their chains they can only look at a wall.
Behind them, which they cannot see, is a fire. Between the
fire and the prisoners is a walkway on which various shapes
and puppets are carried. The shadows cast on the wall are seen
vividly by the prisoners, who spend their lives interpreting
them, because that is all they can see. It is the only reality
they know.

Then Plato shifts the story. Suppose a prisoner is freed of
his chains and compelled to stand up and turn around. What
will happen?

He will be blinded by the firelight, and the true shapes
will seem less real than the shadows he has grown accustomed
to. Similarly, if he is forcibly dragged out of the cave into
the sunlight, he will be blinded by the intense light and will
be unable to see the true reality, though it is all around
him, and always has been.

But eventually his eyes will adjust, and given enough time
to overcome his long exposure to the shadows of the cave, he
will come to accept the new true reality. He becomes enlightened.

And then, if he goes back to his fellow prisoners to tell
them of the wondrous new world he has found, what will be
the reaction of his former bondsmen? As he approaches them
from behind he would cast a shadow, and appear to be coming
to do something harmful to them. No matter what he said, they
would not trust him, because he came out of a shadow. His stories
about sunlight and physical forms would
fall on insensible minds, because such ideas are inconceivable.
The others would view him as an offender, as a violator of
their views, and would put him to death.

Plato then interprets the story, to bring light into
his fellow countrymen. We will do the same.

The prisoners are those who have labored long and hard under
the chains of Classic Activism, and have never
seen another way. The shadows are the process steps used to solve
the sustainability problem, their own actions, and the results.
It is their world. It is the only world. Because there is no
greater world, there cannot be any other way of solving the
problem. There is no other reality.

But there is. Now suppose one of these classic activists bursts
free of his chains one day, climbs out of the cave, and staggers
forth into the sunlight of the real world. At first he will
be blinded. And then he will not believe what he sees. But
because he can touch it, it must be real. Over time he will
come to accept this new world and explore it. And it will not
take him long to see that there is another way to solve complex
social system problems. In fact, there are many other ways.

Out of these many ways he will select the best, and bring
it back to the classic activists still laboring in the darkness
of their cave. He will attempt to describe this wondrous new
way of solving the problem. Will they listen? Or will they
too turn on him and shoot the messenger?

I know from personal experience that most will shoot the messenger,
because it has happened to me more often than not. It is painful.
And it is discouraging.

But there are a few prisoners who, when told that their way
is not the only way, behave differently. They listen. And then
they change.

Someday they will all change, and an
army of enlightened activists will march up out of that cave
into the real world. And they
will turn to new ways of thinking about the problem, new ways
of analyzing it, and new ways of adroitly manipulating the
structure of the system so that it shifts into an entirely
new and proper mode.

Like The Return of the King, The Return of the Virtuous Politician
can happen. It can be a predictable part of the reengineering
of the human system, using the same tried and true techniques
used by science, business, engineers, and academia. But it
can happen only if an analytical approach is taken, by the
newly enlightened prime movers of the modern environmental
movement.

Image Credits - The image of Marcus Aurelius is from the Wikipedia
entry on Marcus
Aurelius. The quote in the caption is from
the Wikipedia entry on his Meditations.
The material on the Allegory of the Cave is from the
Wikipedia entry and other readings. The image of the cave is from here.

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.